English Learning Technique # 2 – Listen to English in a Real Life Context

If you find English difficult to understand when you are listening, you are not alone! Most English learners want to improve their listening skills, and many are not sure how. Here are a few ideas about how to improve your English listening skills:

One of the best ways to improve your listening is through full immersion. If you are surrounded by English all day every day, you will pick up* (*learn) the language naturally. This takes some time, but it is how a child first learns a language, and is the best and most natural way to become fluent. Be careful, though. If you travel to an English speaking country to improve your English, but surround yourself with friends who do not speak English all day, your improvement will be much slower. The best kind of full immersion is when you are surrounded by native speakers of English, and when you are forced to keep trying to understand and be understood out of necessity.

An even better way to improve your listening is full immersion combined with context specific language learning. If, for example, you are going to a market, your listening comprehension will be much higher if you become familiar with the vocabulary and phrases that are typically used in a market setting before and after you go to the market. If you are going out to eat in a restaurant, it is useful to learn and review common restaurant phrases and vocabulary before and after you go to the restaurant. If you join us on an English Immersion Course you will be using this excellent method of improving your listening: learning and reviewing context specific language before and after you do the activity in a real life context.

Another important part of improving your listening is to learn the typical blended sounds that you will hear in a real life setting. “What do you want to drink?”, for example, sounds more like “Whadyawanna drink?”. You can learn these blended sounds on an English Immersion Course, with an online teacher or coach, and through many standard English language textbooks

Sign up below to get help with specific methods to improve your real life English listening at home in your country if you are not able to travel to an English speaking country!